The Left Returns to Sacrifice

by Christopher ChantrillJanuary 17, 2004 at 7:00 pm

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EVER NOTICE how lefties are big on sacrifice?Most of the Democratic presidential contenders were planning to roll back
the Bush tax cuts, at least up until the moment they started to appeal for the votes of real Americans
instead of movement lefties.

Its not just lefties that are into sacrifice.Since time immemorial, humans have felt the need to assuage the guilt and
shame of it all. The way we do this, Frederick Turner reminds us in Beauty,
the Value of Values, is with sacrifice.

Our lives are shameful.We shamefully select one pretty girl to wed and ruthlessly reject others
equally pretty.We conquer and
kill, and elbow others out of our way.The
ultimate shameful fact is that we live day-to-day by killing and enslaving.For meat eaters, this uncomfortable truth is inescapable.We breed, fatten up, and kill billions of animals that we have
domesticated (i.e., enslaved) to our human purposes.But the position of vegetarians is hardly innocent.They feed on the carcasses of grossly-modified grasses that once grew
wild in the hills of Mesopotamia, and they gobble up many other species that we
have dragged into our gardens.So
we must sacrifice to wash away the shame and the guilt.

Sacrifice is a kind of magic and magic, according to
sociologist Rodney Stark, is the way that humans attempt to acquire things that
cannot be gotten by natural means.It
was when the rains failed that the people of the Nazca plain in Peru started
drawing magic lines in the desert pointing to the mountains from whence the
water used to flow.

But magic is expensive, and men have sought to economize on
its cost.In other words, they
cheat.In our western tradition the
first notable instance of cheating occurred on the day Abraham sacrificed a ram
to the Lord instead of his son, Isaac.Others
have substituted the bones and the hide of a bull for the entire bull and its
valuable meat.But it was
Christianity that took the sacrifice concept to the limit and beyond.What, after all, is the biggest sacrifice a father can imagine?Obviously, it must be: the father sacrifices his first-born son.What is the biggest sacrifice imaginable?God sacrifices His Son.

When God sacrifices His Son, it means that we dont need
to sacrifice our sons.God
has paid the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of the world, and we get to keep
our sons, our rams, our bulls, and the Dodge Rams that we might otherwise have
sacrificed to atone for our sins.This
has a real effect on the ground, as David Aikman relates in Jesus in Beijing.Communist Party officials in western China have reported that
villagers who convert to Christianity stop sacrificing their animals when family
members get sick.The result is
that the Christian families get richer.

In our advanced West, of course, many people have abandoned
Christianity and have declared their independence of the Christian experience of
Original Sin.But if Frederick
Turner is right they would still need to enact a sacrifice ritual to atone for
all the killing and enslaving that every human commits, even the granola lefty
who merely enacts a daily slaughter of tender alfalfa sprouts.

Do they ever.Our
modern lefties wallow in sin. There
is the sin of oppressing the poor, there is the sin of patriarchy, there is the
sin of overpopulation, there is the sin of global warming, there is the sin of
smoking, there is the sin of eating meat, there is the sin of fast food, and
there is the sin of gas-guzzling SUVs.And
let us not forget the Four Horsemen of the modern Apocalypse: racism, sexism,
classism, and homophobia.

All this sin could be handled were it not that lefties arent satisfied for us
just to say we are sorry.
They want us to atone for it all with real sacrifice, for they have thrown over
the brilliant Christian invention of symbolic sacrifice, the
ultimate cheat where God sacrifices His Son and we dont have to.Lefties want us to eat less, consume less, travel less, and live
simply that others may simply live.To
top it all, they want us to act out the global sacrifice ritual called the Kyoto
Protocol.

The lefty twentieth century exhibited a
return not just to real sacrifice but human sacrifice, the kind that went out
when God told Abraham to sacrifice that ram instead of his first-born son.Wherever left-wing regimes held sway, whether in a
socialism-in-one-country version or in a national-socialist-German-worker
version, millions of humans were sacrificed to atone for the sins of the world
in the most gruesome manner imaginable.They
call that progress?

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.
Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Societya complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churchesbuilds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.Francis Fukuyama, Trust

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority  the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says we should....Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

When we received Christ, Phil added, all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.
E. G. West, Education and the State